“... its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur Vandenberg in search of British genius, the story doesn’t fit. Secret meetings between the US, UK and Canada to set up the alliance began at the Pentagon just five days after the Treaty of Brussels was signed in March 1948, leading to plans known as the ...”

“... Pantagruel ought not to be set down as nothing.’ Rabelais loved his glass of piot – there is little reason for believing that the draughts of wine are always allegories of higher things – but when Hazlitt conjured up a picture of Rabelais set among his wine-flagons he also thought of him ‘with his books of law, of school divinity and physic before ...”

“... banner of the Sinn Féin party – founded earlier in the century by the non-violent Nationalist Arthur Griffith but from 1917 led by the senior survivor of 1916, Eamon de Valera – this new radical movement won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster in the December 1918 General Election. Assembling in Dublin on 19 January 1919, those elected members not ...”

“... Leopardi, whom he translated; Pasternak, who ‘has meant more to us than any American poet’; Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese (Tu Fu in particular); Apollinaire, whose ‘Hôtel’ was one of his favourite poems. What comes out of this is a feeling for clarity itself as a kind of mystery, and for the lyrical as a gentle shock. Here’s ...”

“... years of no histories, and at the end, effectively, of the Western empire itself. Ammianus is a little ‘wobbly’, as Burrow puts it, on high politics, but good on Rome’s low life, gaming and gossiping in theatre doorways, and on its rich, who were anxious to be recorded as serving the biggest fish and roast dormice in town. He was sympathetic to the ...”

“... experiences. ‘They’re young. They’re in love. They rob banks,’ was the tag line for Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Self-importantly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut was originally slated to direct it, but decided to make Fahrenheit 451 instead), the film portrayed the star-crossed criminals as free ...”

“... interpret the feverish speculation it unleashed on social media? A minute or two in this cramped little space up in the air, between floors. It’s the kind of thing that’s often dismissed as trivial gossip, not something that should matter to us. But that would be to miss the point entirely about what we used to call the zeitgeist, and Solange Piaget ...”

“... including a horse-drawn wagon from Warwick, ‘but their efforts to douse the flames met with little success.’ Half a century’s worth of padded costumes, varnished props and canvas sets fuelled the conflagration, while the mock Tudor half-timbering provided perfect tinder and the Gothic observation tower, ‘with its water-tank for use in the event of ...”

“... prosper.’ In the 1990s the US undertook more than twenty foreign military interventions, with little but anarchic carnage to show for them.Mearsheimer’s response was The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), in which he subjected several of the liberal pieties of the previous decade to closer inspection. In the wake of the ‘no-fault’ aerial ...”

“... out of office I met Callaghan at a party and, after being well patronised about the pessimistic little book that Peter Kellner and I had done on him, told him that he would lose the vote and the ensuing election. He was still blandly convinced that Thatcher lacked the credibility – it’s difficult to remember now how popular it was then to dismiss her as ...”

“... as fraudulent theatre; the circle of real political agents always remains small. Bevins has little time for speculation on the ‘deep state’ or international activity, though he notes that the Gulf monarchies covertly funded the astroturf groups that rolled behind the military coup in Egypt. ‘We were played,’ says one activist from Tahrir.In the ...”

“... were getting unfair advantages in land and in publicly-funded services. Too many knew too little history, and even less about Australia’s human rights obligations under international treaties. The Hansonites’ open resentment of those treaties is only a few degrees cruder and less informed than that of the Coalition. In the course of the Howard ...”

“... at Dryden, ascribed to him an improbable patrician nonchalance at ‘Showing great mastery, with little care’. Shadwell went on to demonstrate this newfound sprezzatura by making heavy weather of Dryden’s heavy weather with the ‘mannerly obscene’, adding for the ornithological record that Poet Squab’s plumage was borrowed. Not only the name, but ...”

“... fantasy talk about ‘double advantage’, cannot have been made by him.Hugh Trevor-Roper (God’s little Dacre) once made the shrewd observation that the Cambridge clique probably amounted to very little in the sum of international violence and conspiracy, but that they could or might have done. They could or might have ...”